The European Union will put in place one of the toughest data privacy laws in the world this week. The law, among other provisions, gives people in Europe the right to obtain the personal data that companies have on them.
That is a sweeping right to data access that Americans don’t have.
So we decided to conduct a privacy experiment: Request our data in both Britain and the United States, to get a sense of how easy it will be for people in Europe to access their personal information compared with American users.
We conducted our experiment using a 20-year-old British law that entitles individuals to see the personal data held about them by companies in that country. The law provides similar data access rights as the coming European rules, known as the General Data Protection Regulation, or G.D.P.R. — offering a sense of how the new law might play out.
Prashant, an editor in London, and Natasha, a technology reporter in New York, requested their records in their respective countries from Amazon, Facebook, Google, LinkedIn, Twitter, their mobile providers and marketing analytics companies that profile users.
The results were not what we expected.
